The old sports adage that a team would rather be lucky than good implies that the two terms should be mutually exclusive, but the Nebraska-Omaha hockey team was both of those things on Friday night.<\/p>\n
The Mavericks have been playing their best hockey of the season in recent weeks — especially at home — and fortunately for them, their rich vein of form carried into Friday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 4-3 win over No. 19 Michigan at Qwest Center Omaha.<\/p>\n
The win was UNO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first over the Wolverines in the teams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 last nine meetings, and it was also the Mavericks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 first home victory over Michigan away from UNO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s old home, the Omaha Civic Auditorium.<\/p>\n
Even rarer for the Mavericks on Friday was that they largely outplayed Michigan, a side that has been one of UNO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biggest bugaboos during its now-dwindling CCHA tenure. <\/p>\n
An early 3-1 lead was slowly erased by the talented Wolverines, though, and UNO ended up needing to rely on two goals apiece from forwards Joey Martin and Terry Broadhurst in order to lock up their first win over the Wolverines since 2006.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Any time you beat Michigan, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153 UNO head coach Dean Blais said after the game, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care when it is, with their 11 NHL draft choices, their talent, their speed, (and) Red Berenson coaching them, whenever you beat them, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a good win. <\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter where. If it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Ann Arbor or here, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a good win.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
During the opening throes of Friday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game, though, Michigan looked the likelier team to eventually come away with the league points. The Wolverines\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 quality scoring chances early in the opening frame didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bear fruit, but U-M was rewarded for its hard work at 7:21 of the period, with forward Chris Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long shot from the top of the UNO slot deflecting off of Maverick captain Mark Bernier\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stick and beating goaltender John Faulkner between his legs.<\/p>\n
UNO quickly took over thereafter, however, with the first of Joey Martin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two goals on the night coming 1:25 after Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opening salvo, and Martin again at 10:52 of the period during a 2-on-1 rush into the Wolverine zone.<\/p>\n
Broadhurst made it 3-1 at the 16:57 mark of the frame, connecting on a cross-ice pass that forced
\nMichigan goaltender Bryan Hogan out of position before the freshman forward scored his tenth goal of the season. With that goal — his sixth in his team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s last three games — Broadhurst became the first UNO rookie to score ten goals in his first season as a Maverick since Tomas Klempa did so during the 2005-06 campaign.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been a lot of fun,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Broadhurst said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been clicking on the power play, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m playing
\nwith two great line-mates, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m kind of just in the right spot at the right time. A lot of hard work is paying off.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
A goal apiece from Louie Caporusso and Steve Kampfer later allowed U-M to climb out of its early hole on Friday and bring Friday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game to its final 4-3 score-line, but the 11:06 remaining after Kampfer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s third-period goal didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see the hard-working Wolverines find an equalizer.<\/p>\n
Michigan head coach Red Berenson thought Friday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s result was fair, though, given the Wolverines\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 early mistakes, especially in and near their own zone.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We gave (UNO) a life,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Berenson said after the game. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our mistakes and our turnovers gave them a life, and all of a sudden, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re on our heels. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a game of momentum, and they took that momentum and we never really completely got it back.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t played them for a year, so I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell you anything about their team, (but) I know they played a hard game. They outworked us for parts of the game, and once they got a couple of goals and got that fever and got that momentum, it was hard (for us) to turn it around.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
UNO (15-12-1 overall, 11-11-3-2 in the CCHA) and Michigan (17-14-1, 12-10-1-0) meet once again in Omaha on Saturday night, with the game being televised nationwide on the CBS College Sports. <\/p>\n
It will also be the Mavericks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 final home CCHA regular-season home game, with the team moving to the Western Collegiate Hockey Association after the current campaign comes to a close. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The old sports adage that a team would rather be lucky than good implies that the two terms should be mutually exclusive, but the Nebraska-Omaha hockey team was both of those things on Friday night. The Mavericks have been playing their best hockey of the season in recent weeks — especially at home — and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10201"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}